Friday, August 16, 2013

The new censors and the rule of law

Don't you feel at all troubled, these days?  Something bothering you?  Have you maybe read a news story or seen an item on TV that concerns you?

Well, keep quiet about it!  Shut up!  Stay silent, say nothing because if just maybe your view doesn't conform to the latest orthodoxy, then you will be pilloried.

Don't believe me?  Consider Yelena Isinbayeva.  The Russian Pole Vault champion was reported to have voiced support for the laws of her motherland or rather one law in particular.  The law that makes it a criminal offence to promote homosexuality to those less than 18 year's of age. 

Cue squeals of outrage from the pink mafia and their slavish followers.

Isinbayeva has now qualified her remarks to say that what she really meant to say, and maybe it got mangled in her use of the English language, was that all people should respect the laws of the country that they are in, at any given time.  So, if you are in Russia and they have a law that says what you can do and say about homosexuality, to an under 18, then follow that law.  She didn't go on to say that in Russia you must also not kill people or steal or set fire to buildings or other stuff but I suspect that she meant all of those laws should also be followed, as well.

I guess it's kind of like when foreigners come to visit the UK, we have this tendency to require them to follow our laws , I understand the same applies in France, the USA and, come to think of it, the whole world over.  Imagine what it would be like to drive in the UK, if Americans could simply ignore the law and drive on the side of the road with which they are familiar.

Personally, I don't have a problem with what I understand of the new law in Russia.  However, if I did, I guess I wouldn't go to that country and if I were a Winter Olympics athlete and felt very strongly about it, I would boycott the Sochi games.  I don't think it would be right for me to expect my fellow athletes to follow me in a boycott, after all, maybe they have their own views which are not totally in synch with mine.  At the moment, people are still allowed to have their own opinions since the new censors haven't yet managed to get their control of 'group think' to be total.  Right now these new censors can only use their minor celebrity status and acolytes to push their views through a like-minded main stream media.

Problem is though, the new censors don't yet control Twitter and blogs like this.  They want to control it though.  Recently, in the UK, some people posted hateful messages on the sites of some women.  Now in respect of some of these messages, they would seem to have been hateful enough that they contravened laws.  In these cases then, the law should be enforced but the new censors want to go after Twitter, instead.  To me' it's a bit like prosecuting knife manufacturers because someone was stabbed or Toyota because a Corolla was involved in a fatal accident.

The real truth though is that these new censors go after Twitter simply because they cannot stand to allow people a medium that they do not control.  They control main stream media - the biased BBC
is riddled with a 'right-on' metropolitan elite that knows better than the people that pay their wages and simply don't process stories that don't fit their agenda.

So if you are at all concerned, either shut up or keep on pushing Twitter and other social media to stay censor free.  Other than the privacy of our own minds (even Big Brother couldn't really get inside Winston Smith's), we have few outlets where we can freely express ourselves.





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